‘Have ministers decided that the threat to children’s safety is a price worth paying so they can look tough on immigration?’
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Earlier this year the Department for Education decided to try to collect nationality and country of birth information for all young people in education in England. As a parent and as a teacher, I feel deeply uncomfortable with this development. No one was consulted on the policy change, which would add this data to the existing national pupil database: not parents, not teachers, not parliament. That database is already made available – including identifying information – to third parties such as universities, the media, the police and the Home Office. This new information on young people could just as easily fall into the wrong hands.

So what’s it for? A government better disposed to helping migrants and their children, you might imagine, could be asking these questions to help support schools in areas where higher numbers of pupils need help with English as an additional language. But, of course, many children who were born abroad or have non-British citizenship speak fluent English, and there are children born here who need that help, so it would be a utterly inaccurate way of getting the right data.

Besides, that information is already held elsewhere, and in ways that don’t involve giving away young people’s names and personal data. If this information gets into the system there will be no safeguards against future changes that would turn our schools into border checkpoints or stigmatise all migrants irrespective of status.

Parents urged to boycott requests for children's country of birth information

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Their explanation is that it will help them to monitor the impact of immigration on our education system. We already know that public services such as education are under pressure. Funding is slow to arrive and inadequate when more people move into an area, whether that’s from elsewhere in the UK or from abroad. Blaming migrants must look like an easier route to take than providing proper funding for those services, but without addressing the real problems they certainly cannot fix them.

The post-Brexit referendum climate here is one in which people are legitimately afraid of an upsurge in racist violence. The government has decided to try to appease the people who think migrants are a problem for this country, and they’ve done so in a way that risks a list of named migrant children becoming public.

Did ministers even consider what the consequences of their actions would be? Or have they decided that the threat to children’s safety is a price worth paying so they can look tough on immigration? Either way, the campaign to scrap this scheme will only grow.

This week, more than 20 organisations have written a joint letter to Justine Greening, the secretary of state, arguing for precisely that. They span the British migrants’ rights movement, but they also include civil liberties and privacy organisations like Liberty and Privacy International. Wherever young people were born, whatever their nationality, their personal data should be treated as sacrosanct.

Hopefully these concerns will have an effect, but we cannot rely on this government’s compassion or common sense. That’s why I’m supporting Schools ABC’s call for a boycott of this exercise. It’s time to make the system unworkable and the data unusable.

As a parent, with one child at primary school and the other at nursery in my local children’s centre, I will refuse to submit this information about my children, as I have a legal right to do. As a teacher, I will refuse to collect this data if asked to do so. If enough people take these small steps perhaps we can force the government to abandon this dangerous and divisive plan.